KEVIN LAWTON wrote: > Interesting instrument, Frank. I guess you could say it is a > 'sister' instrument to the cittern popular in Britain and the > lowlands.
Hehe. More like a daughter actually. During the 18th century both the English guittar and the Hamburger citrinchen were reasonably well known in Norway. Åmund Hansen - who used to build both kinds - got the idea of combining design features of both and came up with this. (Sister is of course just a Norwegian name for the cittern and nobody are very happy about it. We used to call it the zitter but then that name was stolen by that Swiss take of our national instrument.) > Do you have any details of it I have complete full scale technical drawings of one actually. Not of this specific instrument but an almost identical one. A friend of mine is building a copy for me right now. > dimensions, Full length: 780 mm Scale: 437 mm > strings Not sure what kind of strings used. I was actually going to ask the list since it's almost certainly the same as for the English guittar There are ten of them though: four double courses and two single basses. > tuning Absolutely no idea. The Storm tunings I gave in another post are generally regarded as the tunings of the Norwegian cittern but there isn't really much foundation for that assumption. At least one of the Hansen citterns was specifically built for an open chord tuning. > woods used, Standard stuff: spruce top, maple sides and back and apparently birch neck. Mine will have cherry tree sides. The maker was so enthusiastic about this wonderful piece of cherry tree he had found and I said OK since it isn't going to be a very accurate replica anyway. > It looks quite similar to my recollection of something they have in > the little music museum in Stockhom. I wonder if this pattern of > cittern might have been known all over Scandinavia at one time ? Åmund Hansen lived in Halden, a town right on the border to Sweden. (The town grew around a fortress built to keep the Swedes out.) Even though the rumours that Carl Michael Bellman played a Hansen cittern seem unfounded, it's very likely that some of them was shipped across the border. But it shouldn't be confused with the Swedish cittern which is a slightly later and very different instrument. Frank To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
